"The Holiest of All" part VIII

THE SON-THE EVERLASTING CREATOR.
Hebrews 1: 10 - 12 You, Lord, In the beginning have laid the foundation of the earth, and the Heavens are the work of Your hands: They shall perish; but You continue: And they all shall wax old as does a garment. And as a mantle shall You roll them up, as a garment, and they shall be changed: But You are the same, and Your years shall not fail ( Ps. 102: 26, 27).

FIRST SECTION
Hebrews 1: 4-14
The Son of God more than the Angels.

BY THE REV. ANDREW MURRAY

Come and hearken once more to what the Divine message has to tell us of the Glory of the Son, in whom the Father speaks to us. Come and see how truly He is one with God, and shares with him all His Glory. The deeper our insight into the true Godhead of our Lord Jesus Christ, His perfect oneness with God, the more confident shall we be that He will, in His Divine power, make us partakers of His work, His Life, His indwelling.
We find Christ here set before us as the Creator, to whom all owes its existence, as the everlasting and unchangeable One, to whom alone, when all waxes old and perishes, can be said, You continue; You are the same; Your years shall not fail. In Isaiah God speaks of Himself: "Have you not heard, the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth faints not, neither is weary." In our text we see the Son as the Almighty Creator, the everlastingly unchangeable One, that we may know who it is through whom God speaks to us, and to whom He has intrusted the work of our Salvation.

The words are taken from Ps. 102. The ordinary reader would not think that the Messiah or the Son was here spoken of. But, taught by the Holy Spirit, our writer sees how all redemption is wrought only through the Son, and how, therefore, the building up of Zion and the appearing in His Glory (verse 16), the looking down from the Sanctuary and the loosing those who are appointed to death (verse  20), all points to the Son as Redeemer. And then what follows is true of Him too. It is: " You have laid the foundations of the earth, and
the Heavens are the work of Your hands: they shall perish, but You shall endure." God is the Almighty and everlasting: these are the attributes of Him to whom our Salvation is entrusted.

Listen, believer! Christ, your Redeemer, is the Almighty One. God saw that none but His Son could meet your need: have you so seen it, too, that this, His almighty power, has been claimed and appropriated for your daily life? Have you learned never to think of Him otherwise than as the One who calles the things that are not as though they were, and creates what otherwise could not be?

Christ, your Redeemer, is the everlasting and unchangeable One: have you heard Him speak? "I, Yehovah, change not; therefore you are not consumed," and learned to Trust Him as the One who is each moment to you all that He can be, and who will, without variation or shadow of turning, maintain in never ceasing power His Life within you? Oh! learn that God saw it needful to speak to you through none other than such a One as
could reach the heart and fill it with the power of His eternal Word. The Almighty Son, through whom God has created all things, who upholds and fills all things by the Word of His power; this is He who will even so, in the power of His Godhead, uphold and fill your whole life and being. Your Creator is your Redeemer! One great cause of feebleness and backsliding in the Christian life is the power of circumstances. We often say that temptations that come to us from our position in life, from the struggle to live, from the conduct of our fellow-men, draw us away from God, and are the cause of our falling into sin. If we but believed that our Redeemer is our Creator! He knows us; He appoints and orders our lot; nothing that comes to us but what He has in His hands. He has the power to make our circumstances, however difficult, a Heavenly discipline, a gain and a Blessing. He has taken them all up into the Life-plan He has for us as Redeemer. Did we but believe this, how we should gladly meet every event with the worship of an adoring faith. My Creator, who orders all, is my Redeemer, who Blesses all.

And now let me once again urge my reader to mark well the lesson this chapter is teaching us and the object it has in view. Let no one think, as I myself long thought, that, because we firmly believe in the Divinity of our Savior, this chapter, with its proof-texts, has no special message for our spiritual life, and that we may therefore hasten on to what the Epistle has to teach farther on. No, let us remember that this is the foundation chapter. The Divinity of Christ is the Rock on which we rest. It is in virtue of His Divinity that He effected a real cleansing and putting away of sin, that He can actually communicate and maintain the Divine Life in us, that He can enter into our inmost being, and dwell there. If we open our hearts and give them time to receive the full impression of the Truth, we shall see that all that we are to learn of the person and work of Christ has its value and its power from this that He is God. Our Creator, from whom we have our life it is He who alone can enter into us to give the New Life; it is He, Blessed be His name, who will do it now. As God, He is the hidden ground of all existence, and has the power to enter all and fill it with Himself. Every part of His work has the character and the power of a Divine work. If we would but believe that Christ the Son is God, is Yehovah, the Eternal, the Creator, how He would make our inner Life the proof of His Almighty power!

Paul said: "I count all things but loss for the excellency of the Knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord." Let us do so, too. In the Christian life the chief thing, the one thing needful, is the Knowledge of Christ. Not the intellectual apprehension of the Truth, but the Living experimental heart Knowledge that comes from faith and fellowship with Him, from Love and obedience. May it be ours!

1. God Is the incomprehensible One. In all your thoughts of Him, in all your efforts to know Him as revealed in Christ, remember the True Knowledge of God is something above sense and reason. As the Light reveals itself to the open eye that has been created for it, God reveals Himself to the longing heart. All the teaching of angels and prophets, of the words and the truths of the Bible, can but point the way: let God in Christ speak in your heart. Then shall you Know Him. Bow in adoring awe, and worship Christ. "Let all His saints worship Him. It is worship, not study, will prepare us to know Christ."
2. They shall perish: they all shall wax old: this is what the creature is, even though created by God, with every experience, even though coming from God. You continue; You are the same: this is our security and our joy. Christ my Redeemer is the unchangeable every moment the same, my Keeper and my Life.